The Project Gutenberg eBook of Married Life, by May Edginton

"You will, sooner or later," said Rokeby, "and you will marry me. I'll never leave you till you've done it, and then—then I'll never leave you, either, Julia." He advanced upon her, a sudden whirlwind, before whom she cringed back with a helpless sense she had never known before. He opened his arms, enclosed her in them, and kissed her by force, while she struggled and protested furiously under his lips.

"Do you know," he asked, "I came here to-night just to kiss you. Only that! I didn't hope for any more satisfaction, but some day I shall have it. You're not what you think you are. And I'll make you very happy. As a looker-on I've seen a lot of the game called marriage, and I'd know how to make you happy. Don't you believe it?"

"I don't want to believe it; you'd better go; you've behaved disgracefully, and I don't feel in the least like forgiving you."

"Very well," said Rokeby, as Marie's footsteps sounded on the parquetry of the corridor, "I'm going, but I shall come again, and again! You won't get rid of me, I say, till you've married me. And then you'll never be rid of me."

She looked from one to the other, at Julia tall and flaming, and Desmond diffusing a kind of electricity.

"We have been quarrelling frightfully. Miss Winter is never going to allow me here again."

He went out into the hall goodhumouredly to find his coat and hat, and Marie's umbrella, while the two women kissed good-bye. The fold of kimono that covered Julia's bosom heaved rapidly and her eyes were very bright. She would not offer Rokeby her hand, but went to the front door with her arm round Marie's waist.

They looked back to wave at her before they ran downstairs; she looked very tall and brilliant as she stood in her doorway, her head held high, and her mouth tightly set, and when the door had shut upon her, Marie wondered aloud:

"I've done it," said Rokeby, "but don't worry over it. These things adjust themselves, and nothing matters at the moment, anyway, but seeing you safely home."

"I can; and I should certainly like to, if I may. Osborn would never forgive me for leaving you at this time of night."

She thought how kind he was, and how restful. It was attractive to be looked after again, deferred to and considered. Rokeby drove her the whole way out in a taxicab and found the sincerity of her thanks, as they parted, very touching. As for Marie, not for years had she climbed all those cold stairs so buoyantly; and after her long day, as she put her latchkey in the lock, she suddenly sensed the pleasure of coming home. There was nothing to do, in a rush, when she got in; no preparations to make, or food to cook; no setting forward of work for to-morrow, for the charwoman was coming early.

A man was a man certainly, and a quality to miss, but without him there was a great still peace in the flat.

Grannie Amber, blinking drowsily, came out of the dining-room to meet her daughter.

"Lovely, mother. I lunched by myself at the Royal Red, and watched the people. Then I had my fingers manicured, and went to tell Mr. Rokeby about Osborn, and had such a nice tea in his office; he's got such a pretty office. Then he took me to Julia's flat, and we three had dinner together. Oh! we were jolly. Mr. Rokeby cooked; how we laughed! Julia made him wear one of her aprons, and I made him the sweetest cook-cap you ever saw. I don't know when I've enjoyed myself so much."

"He's a nice man," said Grannie approvingly; "I wonder if he's thinking of marrying Miss Winter?"

"Well, duck, I'm an old woman, and in my long life I've noticed that they always do."

Marie went into her dining-room and looked around it with a new sense of authority; she was now a complete law unto that room and all in it.

"I've got a cup of soup for you here, dear," said Grannie Amber, bustling to the fireplace.

"Mother, you shouldn't trouble yourself! But how nice it is!" She drank gratefully, then put the usual question with the usual anxiety:

"What a pity I folded up Osborn's bed, and put it in the children's room! You could have slept here to-night, mother."

"My duck, I'd rather sleep in my own bed," said the old lady, "and I'll be putting my things on, and going there now. You have the woman coming in the morning?"

Then she muffled herself in her wraps and went out bravely into the cold towards the old-fashioned flat across the Heath; and Marie, undressing, went to her bed, too. How still it was! The tiny breaths of the baby scarce stirred the immediate air.

Osborn passed that first night at the best hotel in Liverpool. The term "expenses" provided for the best, in reason, of everything; and a good man at his job need not be afraid of making claims. Osborn was going to be a very good man at his job and, somehow, without any undue swelling of the head, he knew it. His chance had come, the big chance which had laid poor Woodall low, and sent him up, up, rejoicing. When they carried his rather goodlooking luggage—which he had bought new for his honeymoon—into a palatial bedroom of the Liverpool hotel, he experienced, only with a thousand degrees more conviction, that sense of freedom from care which his wife was even then timidly grasping, far away in London. He was provided for handsomely and agreeably for three hundred and sixty-five days.

All his liabilities were provided for, too. No unexpected call could come to him, no fingers delve into the purse that he might now keep privately to himself. He was going out into a big world where life had never taken him before, and he was going untrammeled; strong, young.

Osborn dressed for dinner that evening; he wore the links his mother-in-law had given him as a wedding present, and a shirt whose laundering had been paid for out of that omnipresent thirty-two-and-sixpence, and the jacket cut by the tailor whom he had never been able to afford since. He looked a very nice young man, fresh, broad and spruce, but not too spruce; open-browed, clear-eyed and keen. He was now at the zenith of his physical strength, in his thirty-second year, untired and still eager. As he dressed, he looked at himself in the glass as a man regards himself upon his wedding day.

He had remembered to find out about mails from Cook's and, before going in to dinner, sat down in a great lounge and scribbled a note to his wife; just this information, love, and a further injunction to take care of herself; and no more. Like other husbands who had been similarly placed domestically, he had no idea how this process of taking care was to be accomplished by a harassed and busy woman, but it was some satisfaction to express a verdant hope that it should be done.

He went in, duty done, to an aldermanic dinner. He passed a very successful evening. Actually, only on the eve of his mission, he sold a Runaway car to a fat merchant prince who dined opposite to him; or at least he went as near to the actual selling as it was possible to go in the circumstances. He recommended him to their Liverpool agent, wrote a personal letter, gave his card and received one in return, and parted from his probable client with a feeling that the transaction was going through.

A stupendous piece of luck befell him on board. They were only two days out when he found that a well-known theatrical management was taking a play, with the entire London cast, to New York. It was only on the second day, when, looking across the dining saloon, he saw a raven head on the top of a rather full neck and high shoulders, and met the gay and luring glance which he had met once before, to his secret thrill, across the Royal Red, on the night when he dined there with his wife to celebrate her birthday.

Osborn was a free man; he had broken routine and was out adventuring; and he was goodlooking, he looked worth while. She was a rather stupid actress, with no magnetism but her looks, and no possible chance of ever in this world obtaining a bigger part than the minor one she at present had inveigled from the manager; and she liked well-set-up smart men, men who appeared as if they had money to burn. There were no obstacles placed in Osborn's way.

He was highly elated when the end of a week found him calling her familiarly "Roselle," when he could walk the deck with her after breakfast, and join her party for bridge in the afternoons, and withdraw to a warm corner of the saloon with her after dinner, there to become better acquainted. He was at last, he said to himself, loosening those domestic chains which had hobbled him, and was doing more as other men did.

She gulled him into thinking her clever; all she said and did and looked excited him; she was so different from the women whom men of his class married and with whom only they became intimate; a fellow on two hundred a year with a wife and family could not afford the society of the stage. But a fellow with three hundred a year and any commission his smartness could make, all just for mere pocket-money, was in a different boat altogether. The sums he staked at bridge with Roselle and her party on those winter afternoons in mid-Atlantic used to keep the household at No. 30, Welham Mansions for a week. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost; but either seemed to him immaterial in this new lightness of his heart.

She used to say reckless things to him which stirred the blood. Thus: "You and I, Osborn"—he knew, of course, that familiarity with Christian names was a trait of the stage—"have met, and presently we shall part; and what was the good of meeting if this dear little friendship is just to be packed up with our luggage?"

"That's a sweet way of putting it; you're one of those light-hearted people who don't mind saying goodbyes."

On the windy deck she used to wear a dark purple velvet hat slouched down and pinned close against her darker hair. It showed up the whiteness of her face, which even the saltwinds could not whip into colour, under the coating of white cosmetic almost imperceptibly laid on. Osborn loved that hat, as he loved the graceful tilt of her skirt and the fragility of her blouses; and sometimes it occurred to him to question why men's wives couldn't wear things like that. One sunny afternoon they had, when, instead of playing bridge, they sat in a sheltered corner on deck and talked.

"Are you really?" she said, and she thought in her shallow mind that he must be very well off indeed.

Osborn did not tell her that his firm sent him to an expensive hotel for their own ends; it was pleasant to have her thinking what she did. He asked if he might call upon her in New York; if she'd have supper with him sometimes; come for a run in his two-seater which he was taking over with him. They made a dozen plans which, after all, could not hurt Marie, and the prospects of which were charming to a degree.

Osborn had written his Christmas letters to his wife and children on board, and his first errand on landing was to mail hastily-chosen gifts to them. A box of sweets for the kids, a bottle of scent for Marie, these seemed to suit the occasion quite well. He even remembered a picture-postcard view of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to bear seasonable wishes to Grannie Amber. Then Roselle claimed him.

Osborn had a good deal of odd time to put at her disposal, and she disposed of it with no uncertain hand. His way was not so uphill as he had expected; within a week he was touching big commission, bigger than he had dreamed of, with the prospects of plenty to follow. And driving his electric-blue, silver-fitted Runaway two-seater about New York, or over to Brooklyn, he placed Roselle in her inevitable fur coat and slouched down purple velvet hat, as a splendid business asset, beside him. At least he told his conscience that a smart woman in a car is unparalleled advertisement for it and perhaps he was right; but that was not the reason for her presence there.

When they said good-bye, under the wintry trees of the remotest part of a great park, it hurt him. He set his hands suddenly on her shoulders, and looked into her eyes; and then, it being almost dusk, and no one very near, he slid an arm round her, and held her to him for one swift instant. When she let him kiss her, with a yielding as passionate as response, he was surprised at his own stupidity in not tasting such sweets before.

"I've got to go," he said. "You've been a darling, to me. I'm crazy about you; I suppose you know that?"

Her slow smile drove deep dimples into her white cheeks; she looked at him warmly; and yet, had he not been too excited to note it, with an acute appraisement. "We're to be here another month," she said, not answering his query, "leave me your address; you have mine."

"That's what I feel; that we haven't met just to part. You're wonderful. You're the most wonderful woman I've ever met."

He had Marie's last letter in his breast-pocket at that moment, and as Roselle stirred against him he heard the slight crackling of the paper. It dropped like a trickle of cold water into his excitement and desire. He took Roselle's arm lightly in his hand, and turned about.

In a shaded tea room, full of screens, rose-lights and china tinkling, he sat looking at her. She was wonderful; with the rather high set of her shoulders, her white, full neck, the depth of her hair and eyes, her short and tenderly kept hands, she was romance. You couldn't imagine such a woman sinking into the household drudge whatever her circumstances; she stood for all that was easy and pleasant, scented and soft, in woman. Osborn felt, as many a man has done and will do again, all memories, all fidelity slipping from him, in the lure of the hour. Leaning forward, he said imperatively:

"I want to have you all to myself till to-morrow—till I've got to leave you. It would be heaven; but—"

Roselle Dates was of that talented community of stupid women who understand and manipulate life through their super-instinct of sex merely; who know how to take all and give nothing; suckers of life and never feeders. She looked at him and sighed and smiled, and shook her head, and touching his hand, whispered:

"But that's impossible. It isn't often a woman makes a friend like you. Let it last a little longer, there's a dear boy."

She sighed again. "Every inch of life is snared, for women. In a profession like mine you watch each step. My goodness, you do! Or you'd fall into one of the traps."

She refused to answer. Becoming suddenly capricious with the caprice that is the armour of her kind, she wished to be taken home. After he had left her, he walked the streets moodily for an hour before going in himself.

He had to pack for an early start next morning. In a bedroom where a prince might have slept, he threw himself into an easychair and brooded. Roselle became more than ever desirable, as he imagined her, sitting in that shaded tea room, her fur coat opened and thrown back to show the fragile corsage underneath. She was romance; the fairy tale, which he had read and mislaid, found again. Putting his hand up, he pulled out his wife's letter, and read it again cursorily before casting it into the wastepaper basket.

How dull it was! What a lack of sparkle and spontaneity it showed! Something seemed to happen to women after marriage, making them prosaic; growing little nagging consciences in them; egging them on to a perpetual striving with things that were damned tiresome. And the letter that he would write back would be just as constrained; there would be no joy in the writing of it as there would be writing the letters that would be sent to Roselle.

"MY DEAR OSBORN" (Marie wrote), "Thank you for your letter. You are very good to write so regularly every mail. We are so glad to know what a successful trip you are having. We are all very well; and mother gave the children a tree for Christmas, and we hung your box of sweets and my scent on it. They couldn't think how you had managed to put them there! Thank you so much for the scent. I am having the dining-room carpet cleaned. The children send their love and so do I.—Your affectionate wife,

"MARIE."

"P.S.—Baby has cut another tooth."

"My God!" said Osborn resignedly, as he tore the letter across. "Marriage is a big mistake. To tie oneself up for life at twenty-seven...!"

Osborn was in Chicago, prospering exceedingly, when Roselle's second letter came.

He hurried to her without a moment's loss. She was staying at a boarding-house full of noisy young business people, among whom she was a sensation. She received Osborn in a great smudged parlour decorated with much gilt and lace curtains.

"I expect you were. I expect you've been as glad ever so many times." She looked at him shrewdly. "I didn't tell you in New York," she said, letting her hand remain in his. They were alone in the horrible room. "But my contract was for the passage out and three months playing with Sautree; not for the passage home. You see, I wanted to get out here somehow and see what I could do. It does one good to have been in the States."

She saw the quick flush on his face and the light in his eyes, and playfully put against his lips two fingers, which he kissed.

"Only temporarily of course. I'm going round the hotels to-day—I shall get plenty of entertaining to do. When I'm tired of this, I shall move on."

It was what, vaguely, in her mind, Roselle meant to do. She wanted experience; but to gain it comfortably would need a certain amount of financing; and she thought she had tested the fairly satisfactory depth of his pockets, although he had told her nothing.

"Then tour it on your own. Only can't we be travelling companions? I'll see to your tickets and luggage and so on."

"And I shan't have any hotel expenses," she added, lighting a cigarette; "I shall work them off and see a profit."

Osborn's year now took on for him the aspect of the most magnificent adventure sated married man ever had.

"You are a tease. Roselle, it's so tophole to see you again; let me kiss you good morning."

She took the cigarette from her mouth to return his kiss; she was bright-eyed and hilarious. She knew that he was a fool as men were, unless they were brutes; and you had to make the fools whipping-boys for the brutes. As he kissed her, she knew that she was going to use him; to take all and give nothing.

Into the spring sun they drove; she had the inevitable fur coat and the hat he loved, and she looked beautiful. By the time he ranked the car outside one of Chicago's best restaurants for lunch, she had what she called a pocketful of contracts, to sing at this restaurant and that; to dance for her supper and half a guinea at a ruinous night club, for she could do everything a little. But her greatest asset was her beauty.

Osborn's letters told Marie very little of his doings; they almost conveyed the impression, though he would have been uneasy to know it, of careful epistles penned by a bad schoolboy. His letters from Chicago might have been replicas of those from New York; from Montreal he began on the same old note, though, in answer to her request to teach a stay-at-home woman descriptive geography, he once launched forth into an elaborate account of his rail journey on the Canadian Pacific, from Montreal westwards. Marie was not disappointed in the letters; they were what she would have expected. But sometimes, as she read their terse and uninteresting sentences, their stodgy bits of information, she smiled to think how marriage changed a man.

How irritating and constrained it made him! How prosaic! How it walled-up passion, as one read how a nun who had loved too much was walled-up, in the old fierce days, with bricks and mortar!

"MY DEAR MARIE," (or sometimes "Dear Wifie"),—

"How are you all getting along? I'm in —— now, as you will see by my changed address. Business has been fairly good.... It was rather a pretty journey here; I must send George a book about the wild flowers on the prairies.... I am glad to hear you are all so comfortable. Are you going earlier to Littlehampton this year, or shall you wait till the summer as usual? Of course, when I went with you, we had to go in the summer because my turn for holidays came then; but I should think the rooms would be cheaper earlier in the year. I am rather glad you are having the carpet cleaned....

"With love to you and the children,

"YOUR AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND."

In the spring a sorrow came with a shock into Marie's even life. Grannie Amber died suddenly. In the evening she had played with the children at No. 30, and in the morning she was found in the little old-fashioned flat on the other side of the Heath, sitting in her easychair by a dead fire, with her bonnet and cloak on, just as she had sat down to rest for awhile on her return.

She left her daughter a good deal of old furniture which sold for a fair sum to dealers; and an income of two hundred and twenty pounds a year.

For a while sorrow kept Marie much to the rut in which she had moved since Osborn's departure; but the grief for a parent is so natural and inevitable a grief; it is not as the grief for a husband or a child; and when the first warm days of April came Marie took some very definite steps forward on that road where she had, last December, set her feet. It was Julia who roused her finally to the course.

Julia came and said: "Do you know, my dear, you're years younger? You're your pretty self again. And what are you going to do now that you are such a rich young woman?"

It was a week later that the capable maid was installed in the flat. She slept in a tiny room which had hitherto been relegated to boxes, but which now was furnished with one or two left-over pieces from Mrs. Amber's sale, and the hall-porter, who realised that Mrs. Osborn Kerr had inherited money, was pleased to care for the boxes. The servant brought rest and charm into that flat; and George went half-daily to a near-by school, taking himself to and fro with the utmost manfulness.

Marie was having the first dinner-party for which she had not to cook herself, and the party consisted of Julia and Desmond Rokeby.

Rokeby had leapt at the invitation flatteringly; but Julia had been inscrutable in her demur, until begged in such terms as were hard to refuse.

"You're the only two people I really know intimately," Marie said; "if you refuse, you'll spoil it all. In fact I don't believe I can have a man to dinner alone without exciting Mr. and Mrs. Hall Porter."

When she uttered this little vain thing, she laughed and looked in the glass and patted her hair.

As Marie Kerr came out of her bedroom and proceeded down the corridor to inspect the table arrangements, she was a pretty picture of all that a well-dressed, happy, healthy young woman should be. She paused by the door of the erstwhile dressing-room to look in on the two elder children, then entered the dining-room. Spotless napery and most of the wedding-present silver equipped the table, as it used to do in the early days of her marriage. Between the candlesticks were clusters of violets. A bright wood fire burned upon the hearth, but the golden-brown curtains were not yet drawn upon the evening. The golden-brown carpet, newly cleaned, was speckless again. Marie moved about, improving on the table arrangements, and the hands which touched this or that into better design were little, slim and white. The finger nails had regained their tapering prettiness. And as she smiled with pleasure, between her lips an unblemished row of teeth showed. She wore black, to her mother's memory, but her gown was the last word in cut and contour; it opened in a long V to show her plump white neck; underneath the filmy bodice a hint of mauve ribbons gleamed. In her ears slender earrings twinkled. They were amethyst, and had been her mother's. She had put them on for the first time that evening as she dressed, because, regarding herself earnestly in the glass, there had risen up over her shoulder, for no reason whatever, the sleek pale face of the manicure girl, who wore emeralds in her ears. And when she had clipped them on she was thrilled; they gave her a distinctive, a resolute charm. She could smile at herself again in that glass, at the colour and light and verve which had come back to her. The face pictured there had all the roundness, the softness and pinkiness of the face of the bride Marie, who had waked and looked therein on wonderful mornings, but it held more than the face of Marie the bride. It was strong; it had firmness and judgment and humour. It was no fool of a face. Yet, as the wisest and strongest of women can delight in vanities, so Marie delighted in the earrings which she wore to-night, as an inspiration, for the first time.

From her dining-room Marie went to the sitting-room, rosy in the light of another wood fire. Every day now she used her sitting-room. Tea was brought to her there, placed at her elbow as she sat in a cosy chair before the fire, and she drank it at leisure—while the maid gave the children their meal in the dining-room. In that chair by the fire, all the spring, Marie had read the new books, for she could afford to pay a library subscription. In that chair, as she rested, the lines had smoothed from her face, her neck had grown plump again, and the stories of modern thought, of modern love and its ways, had stimulated her brain once more to thoughts of its own. She loved the sitting-room better than she had loved it even when it was first furnished; it was now peculiarly her own. When she thought of Osborn's return, as she did now and then with a curious mixture of feelings, she knew, half-guiltily, that somehow she would grudge him a share in those pleasant evenings by the fire.

Marie sat down to wait for Julia and Desmond, and, taking up her half-finished novel, put her silk-stockinged feet on the fender, leaned back, and opened the book at the place where she had left the story. It was a love story, and as she read she thought: "How well I know this phase! and that phase!... but we will just see what happens after they're married." Her thought was not bitter, only interested and curious, because her own hurt was over, and a wisdom, a contentment, had come.

Julia and Desmond arrived together, much against Julia's will; and they all sat down in the pretty pale room, while the maid drew the curtains upon the gathering dusk and switched on the light.

They sat and talked of trivial things, waiting for the serving of dinner to be announced; and Marie remembered how often, in the past years, she had longed to sit there comfortably, thus till a well-trained servant should open the door noiselessly and say: "Dinner is served, ma'am."

They went in to a well-ordered dinner; there was a pleasant peace and harmony in the flat; and as Rokeby looked at Marie's face, which had won back all its old prettiness, as well as attaining the strength of the woman who has suffered, he did not marvel, but he was a little sad. And he wondered slightly just what was going to happen to Osborn when he came home. But Julia, as she looked at Marie, was triumphant; she did not wonder what was going to happen to Osborn; she thought she knew. And all dinner she tried to hurl tiny defiances into Rokeby's teeth, asking with sparkling malice:

"Isn't Marie looking her own self again? Isn't it lovely to see her? Doesn't grass-widowhood suit her? Isn't it a screaming success?"

There was a piano in the flat now; it had been Grannie Amber's, and was old, but still it fulfilled its purpose of a musical instrument. It stood in the sitting-room, across one of the corners by the fire, and after dinner Marie played and Julia sang; and when she refused to sing more, it was Desmond's turn. He looked through Marie's pile of music, selected a song, and sat down to play his own accompaniment with a light and beautiful touch which came as a surprise to the listening women, who knew nothing of his drawing-room talents. He went from song to song, and all at once Marie, transferring her gaze from contemplative dreams, saw Julia's face. Julia leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin in her palms, looking at the man at the piano, and in her eyes ran the old tale, and her red lips smiled and her breast heaved. But she became conscious of Marie's look, and sitting up sharply, drew, as it were, a blind down over the light.

She looked at Rokeby's creaseless back, at his fingers wandering over the keys, and for the first time she noticed how sensitive, how caressing the fingers were. Yet that two people in her intimate circle could contemplate that through which she herself had passed painfully, as through ordeal by fire....

It made her very kind to them both, though a small stir of queer jealousy was in her. Before hell they would know heaven. Love and marriage began with the celestial tour....

When they came out into the hall presently, to put on their outdoor wraps, she beckoned them to the door of the children's room. The baby had joined the two elder ones, and three small cots now stood in a row, closely packed. A night-light gave enough glimmer to see the warm faces lying peacefully on the three pillows. The women crept in and looked down upon a scene which will always make women's hearts sing, or ache; and Rokeby followed. To his lover's mind, never had Julia Winter appeared so adorable as when she bent low over the fat baby, and murmured to it the small feckless loving things that all women always have murmured to all the babies in the world. She touched its outflung hand delicately with a finger, and lingered there, filled with woman's world-old want. And out of the twilight Marie sent a whisper which reached them both.

"Of course, you're never going to marry, either of you. But if you ever want to, and you're hanging back, wondering, just don't wonder. Remember that the children are worth—everything."

Rokeby was after her in a second to hold her coat. The way in which she turned her back on him so that he might lift it on was peculiarly ungracious.

Marie was in the background, wanting a lover again. When they had gone she drew back the curtains, threw up the windows, and leaned out into the sweet, chill spring night. She drank it and loved it, and all her being cried out for love.

But she did not want love grown old, which came in and put on its slippers, and grumped: "Can't those kids keep quiet?" if it heard the voice of the children of love, and which hid itself behind a hedge of daily paper, or flung out again from home, in the ill-tempered senility of its second childhood.

She wanted love new-grown; with a bloom upon it, fresh and young; love at its beginning, before it was ripe and over-ripe, and spoiling and falling from its tree; such a love as she imagined Julia and Desmond even then to be driving towards.

In a taxicab—for where else in all London could he be alone with her?—Rokeby was taking Julia home. She allowed it in spite of herself; yet was angry with them both for the circumstance which brought them together close, which enclosed them in a privacy which made her remember, with a vividness which disturbed her, the sensations of that first and only kiss. He was asking her again:

"I thought I did. But to-night when I looked at you looking at those kids, I knew differently. You want to be married and have children of your own. I don't know as much about me—don't know," he said in a slight break of despair, "that I come into the picture much."

"When I ask 'Can't you relent'?" said Rokeby, "I ought to say instead 'Can't you confess?' That's what you don't want to do."

She paused a long while and he declared passionately: "You're afraid to risk marriage and yet you want to. You don't know what to do. You like being loved; you pretend you don't, but you do. You're feeling how sweet it all is. But you will not own it even to yourself."

"Why, look around and see the muddle and mess most people make of the contract."

"So do I. Why shouldn't I be afraid as much as you are? If we got married and muddled and messed things up, wouldn't it hurt me as much as you?"

"I'm not most men. I'm just me. You're you. We're different. Besides, we've seen and thought and argued it out to ourselves as well as together. Couldn't you risk it?"

He laughed. "Couldn't I have it, then? Well, to tell you a secret, you couldn't either. But another secret is that, probably, neither of us would really want it."

"That's true. It's dreadful the way married people learn to cling to each other."

The biggest moment of Rokeby's life was when he took her, for the second time, into his arms, and felt her lips respond to his. She shut her eyes and saw again the vision of the three cots side by side in a dim room; and his eyes, on her face, saw the mother-ecstasy there. "You wonder!" he exclaimed.

It was a long drive from Hampstead, and all the time she was within his arms, and all the time he told her of all they would be to each other; of how he loved her. And at last she stood alone in her flat, with her bedroom lights switched on, looking at a radiant creature in the glass, and crying within herself:

Already the homelike quality of her home had vanished; the dear possession of her things had become less dear. She could think of another home, a bigger one, and a hearthplace with her husband's face opposite her own. She sat down by the dressing-table, and laid her hands idly in her lap, and thought all the rosy things that women in love do think.

She lunched the next day with Desmond as a matter of course. He called for her at her office, and drove her away possessively. There was no more solitude for her, no more proud loneliness, no more boastful independence. Already she clung and already she enjoyed it. When, over the table, he asked: "Isn't it nice being engaged?" she nodded, smiling, and answered: "I'm wondering why I haven't done it before."

"... In another week," he wrote, "I shall be with you all again. It will be good to see you. Of course, this has been rather a rag, and I think I shall hold down the job for ever and evermore; but a year is a long time, isn't it? I look forward to coming home. I shall have a lot to tell you, but I expect I shall want to hear your news first, and how George has got on at school, and so on."

The letter had an unwonted postscript: "I wonder if you've missed me, old girl."

It was waiting for Marie on a grey afternoon when she returned from a lecture, for which, a year ago, she would have needed a dictionary, but which now entered her brain glibly and was at home there. All that afternoon she had been listening to an exotic discourse on "Woman and her Current Philosophy"; and now—here was Osborn's letter, suggesting calmly, proprietorially almost, his re-entry into her life. Was it possible that he had been away for a whole year? Or possible that he had been away for only a year? Rapid as the stride of Time had been, he was already a stranger, someone dimly perceived, arriving from another life, and hardly making his presence felt.

She stood reading the letter attentively, noting its points and phrases with even detachment; its arrival arrested her thoughts, although she had known it must come soon. Its sender was already on his way to her, expecting the eager welcome of home; and home had nothing but stereotyped compliments to offer. Who was he, anyway?

Just the man who had made the domestic laws in No. 30, had made them disagreeably and could make them no longer, whose power was broken. The keeper of the purse; the winder of the clocks of life; the hostile element in a peaceful day; the shade of a dead lover long since trampled under the domestic battle-ground.

She came for the second time to the postscript and smiled vaguely and faintly. He wondered if she had missed him.

As Marie Kerr stood by the fire in her sitting-room with Osborn's letter in her hand, she awoke fully, as from a dream, to the understanding of what was about to befall her.

She was once more, after this year of miraculous growth and power and recovery, to take unto herself her husband.

The door opened and the maid came in quietly, a teacloth over her arm, the tray in her hand. She arranged all to please the taste of the mistress who stood watching as if she watched something unusual.

For a whole year, in that flat, she had been the person whose will was government, who had to be pleased and obeyed. She had made the laws, kept the purse, and set the clock.

She laid aside her furs, sat down and poured out her tea. Presently she heard George come in—he now went to school for the whole, instead of the half day—and the happy clatter of the children in the dining-room. There was no one to cry testily: "For God's sake keep those children quiet!" as if the children were aliens—crimes of the mother.

When she had finished her tea, and had heard the maid come out of the dining-room, she went in, to romp with her children. It was an hour she loved and for which she now had zest; she could enjoy it to the full. They played Blind Man's Buff, in which even the baby joined staggeringly, and Hunt the Slipper—the baby's little one, which she wanted to keep whenever it was smuggled under the edge of her little flannel petticoat; and for the last ten minutes Marie went back to the sitting-room to tinkle on the piano, while the maid was requisitioned once more to make a fourth to play Musical Chairs. Then the children came into the sitting-room, hand in hand, and stood by the piano and sang the lullaby their mother had taught them. She joined her voice to theirs with all its old strength and sweetness. And she heard their prayers and tucked them up in their beds.

Then she went into the room which for a year had been hers and, while she changed into her soft black frock, the realisation came that she was again to share it. Her lips curled.

Why couldn't they go on for ever in this flat as they were now, sufficient unto themselves, she and the children?

She returned to her book by the fire. And while she read on deeper into the love-story, absorbed and credulous in spite of herself, the front door bell rang.

Julia and Desmond Rokeby came in with a great air of mystery and jubilation. They walked with the rich expectancy of people treading golden streets, and though they came up to Marie, captured and embraced her, laughed, and began relevant explanations both together, their eyes looked through her, away and beyond her, and she had a sense of being right outside their scheme for ever and evermore.

Loneliness assailed her rather bleakly as she stood with a smiling mouth, gazing from one to the other and trying to gather the gist of their news.

"We know you'll be awfully surprised," Julia cried, treating her to squeezes of nervous rapture, "but—"

"Now, darling," said Rokeby, "let me. You see, Marie, we've gone and done for ourselves. May we sit down with you just a moment while I tell you? I knew that Julia—"

"Don't cut in and spoil the story, dearest," he urged. "I knew she'd never make up her mind really to get married, you know, Marie, so this afternoon I met her coming out of the office, drove her to a church where all arrangements had been made, took one of those handy permits out of my pocket—a special licence, you know—and—"

"You're married," said Marie Kerr in rather a dull way which disappointed them both.

"After all, Marie," said Julia breathlessly, "don't you think it's the nicest way; without any fuss and premeditation, and bridesmaids, and cake and things? Just our two selves."

"It was splendid," said Rokeby. "I'm the first man I know who ever really enjoyed his wedding."

"I do congratulate you both; it's all so exciting and romantic. Oh! I do hope you'll always be very happy."

"Where are you going?" she asked by and by. "We went to Bournemouth. We had such a delightful time..."

"For a while we are; no letters; no telegrams; no intrusions of any kind. Just us. See how marriage takes a hardened bachelor!"

"I do hope," Marie repeated, "that you'll be very happy. When will you come back?"

"And the first thing we do," said Julia affectionately, "will be to come and see how our Marie is, left all alone without us."

"Don't!" Marie begged. "You're making me gulpy. For two pins I'd cry. You two—you've just been everything to me this year, after the children. You don't know how lonely you're making me feel."

"Oh, great!" Rokeby cried; and Mrs. Rokeby added: "I am glad. Now you won't be lonely any more."

She took Julia's bare left hand from her muff and looked at the rings and stroked it.

"We must fly," said Julia, rising. "Our taxi's outside, with all the clothes I've had time to pack, upon it. Desmond had packed in anticipation, the wretch! And we've only got an hour—but we just had to come in and tell you before we went."

"I hope you and Osborn will have another honeymoon like ours is going to be," Rokeby cried as they hurried through the hall.

She shook her head, vaguely smiling, but her lips would frame nothing. She was glad to shut the door upon their happiness. It seemed as if everything young and fierce in her were pulling at her heart. How she wanted it again, that amazing rapture and discovery! As she sat down again by her fire in the quiet flat, she would have bartered half the remaining years of her life for just that first year over again.

She went across to the window, pulled aside a curtain, and beheld rows and darts of lights like stars; street lights and house lights beckoned to her; she opened the window slightly and the distant sound of traffic, the drums of London rolling, excited and affrayed her.

Restless as she was, she had trained herself too well in the ruthless habits of method and industry not to begin automatically to set all in order against the coming of the master of the home. Feeling the need of doing rather than of thinking, she went to the bureau, and picked her account-books from their pigeonholes. Accurate and businesslike, they should be presented. They were ruled with neat margins, the columns headed precisely; each quarter of the year showing a favourable balance in hand. There was no doubt but that she was a creditable housekeeper. She opened them one by one memorising with a certain pleasure their tributes to her capacity. One big item had been wiped off altogether last spring, after her mother's death: the rest of the furniture instalments, which, on the extended system for which Osborn had been obliged to arrange after George's birth, would have dragged on for two years more. Grannie Amber's sale had more than paid for all.

"He can't say I haven't been careful," she thought. Besides, she was now a woman with an income of her own; with two hundred and twenty pounds a year in her pocket, the right to which no man could question. If he demurred at the maid, and at George's school bills, she could point to her ability to pay.

She knew how greatly she had changed during their separation; to the change that might have been wrought in Osborn she gave little, thought, not caring much. She supposed that he would come home much as he left it, refreshed doubtless, better-tempered, and full of his holiday, to the stories of which she would give a dutifully interested hearing. But that he could ever rouse again in her the passion and pain which had prostrated her on the night when she knew he was to leave her was ironically impossible. As she sat over her account-books, her memory cast back to that evening, how she had stood, in silent agony, beside the table, sorting over his stock of clothes; how feverishly and blindly she had sewed, trying to hide from him all that to-morrow meant to her; how, when he had gone to bed, she had kneeled by his chair and sobbed, and prayed that no other woman should ever wean him from her....

She waked often in the solitude of the night, imaging the bride and bridegroom on the track of rapture, following the unwaning star.

In the morning there was a cablegram for her, reading: "Home on Thursday.—OSBORN."

To-day was Monday. She stood with tight lips for a moment wondering just how to set this scene of reunion; the flat was not large, comprising as it did the tiny slip of a room in which the maid slept, the children's room, her own, and the two sitting-rooms and kitchen. All the day she arranged and rearranged the accommodation in her head.

She was not only reluctant for Osborn, but almost shy of him; he had left her thoughts so that it seemed impossible that he had ever had the right to intrude, at all hours, on her privacy; impossible that it should ever be so again. After all, there were many husbands and wives who went their own way, led their own lives, and the outside world never knew. To such a confraternity would she and Osborn now belong, living under one roof, but separated, separated not only by walls, but will.

For she did not want him any more; she could not contemplate his assumption of the husbandly role. It sounded strange as she uttered it aloud to herself, but there it was.

She thought: "Had he never gone away, had we gone on living as we lived then, year in, year out, this would never have happened. People don't get out of a deep rut like that unless they're helped out. But now I've had a year to get my looks back; to sit down and think, and I know things that I should never have guessed before."

After she had taken the baby for her morning airing on the Heath, she left the two younger children with the maid, and went into town to lunch. She chose again the Royal Red, but not the table behind the pillar from which she had peered, glad of its shelter for her shabbiness, a year ago. She took a table at the side of the room where she could see and be seen, and she looked at the other women without envy or hatred, with no more than a level sense of rivalry which was almost pleasant. If she had not known how well she looked, the glances of men would have told her. She lingered long over her coffee, enjoying her opportunity and her freedom, and telling herself—resolved as she was that it should not be so—"Well, it's probably my last time like this."

She was in Regent Street after lunch, looking into a blouse shop, when she saw close at hand the Beauty Parlour sign which brought to her memory at once the sleek pale girl with the emerald earrings. Something made her curious to see the girl again, and she went in, to find her still there, the emeralds still in her beautiful close ears, but sharper set, a year wearier.

She uttered charming things of madame's white hands. And, surely, she had never had the pleasure of seeing madame there before?

She reflected: "It's very true, that. No one had ever seen me, this me, a year ago."

Just as she had felt no hate for the women in the Royal Red, so her sense of hostility to the girl bending over her hand had vanished. She was a friendly rival, not to be feared. And she was not so peerless, after all; there were flaws under the powder with which she coated her pale skin.

"I have never seen prettier nails, madame," said the manicurist, as she smeared on cream.

After she left the Beauty Parlour Marie had nowhere to go. There was no Rokeby to give her tea in his comfortable office while he offered her business advice; he had been very good with his advice over the question of Marie's inheritance. Neither was there a Julia to ring up and invite to tea at one of the numberless cosy teashops of the West End. Marie turned in, at three o'clock, to a matinée and bought an upper circle seat, a few minutes late for the rise of the curtain on the first act of an ultra-modern play.

The play was all about marriage. It dissected marriage into a thousand pieces, and held every piece which was not turned into tragedy up to ridicule. It fostered all the nonsense which fretted in idle women's hearts, and touched many sore spots in others; and made men smile cynically as if saying, "That's got it to the life." This play kept Marie Kerr enchained; it set her wondering why the Marriage Service had ever been written and consecrated; it blew to and fro the winds of the storm in her soul until a tempest rocked her mind; she drew a black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the situation between Osborn and herself. But at last, when the playwright had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a pivot, and the pivot was the cradle. The playwright gave the playgoers the happy ending for which the world craves and sent them home relieved.

He sent Marie Kerr home relieved, too; but the day had not changed her mind. She was fixed and, she felt, irrevocably. Over her solitary dinner she thought of the play; and she thought of the fight to be fought in her own home, and she slept upon it, to awake unmoved in the morning.

Osborn Kerr was coming home with the happy sense of expectancy which is common to the wanderer. He had prepared for departure with a high heart and a holiday feeling running through everything, like champagne, but he packed for his return with a very warm pleasure in looking forward to the welcome waiting for him, right across all that space, in the flat an which he had established home.

Looking back as well as forward, only the pleasant and sweet things of his marriage remained impressed on his mind. The cosiness of the home and not the worry of paying for it instalment by instalment; the good dinners Marie cooked, not the grudge of giving out that housekeeping allowance which paid for them; the prettiness and sunniness of his wife rather than the faded looks and uncertain temper of the last few years; the three fine kids he'd got, not the nuisance and noise and expense which he had so often declared them.

The rosy cloud of time and distance had rolled between Osborn and all that was his at No. 30 Welham Mansions. Before his year of adventure was up he found himself thinking of them sentimentally; he found that they were embedded pretty deep in his heart. They were real; other things were—

He added therefore a postscript to his letter to his wife, an addition written in a sudden thrust of pathos, a want of her almost like the old want:

In the trash he felt, though he had not given the idea the form of a thought, that Roselle Dates was included. She had never bored, being too clever in her stupid, instinctive way for that; but sometimes she had sickened him. She had wanted so much. She seemed always wanting something. At first her pallid and raven beauty and her clever silliness had been sheer stimulation, but when you grew used to her....

She had nothing behind. And she was mean with the sex meanness, the cold prudence of the sex-trafficker. She would never have given; she would only have sold, and that at a price far beyond Osborn Kerr's pocket-book even at its recent splendour. But she did not want to sell either; she wanted to take and take, to squeeze and squeeze. Once—that was in San Francisco, where she had beaten together a concert party and shone as its brightest star—when he had been disappointed of a big deal and had come to her with the story....

She had said: "Look here, boy! What do you mean by asking me out to lunch and moping? I don't want to hear your troubles. There are plenty of people here who'll amuse me without pulling long faces over dropping a little cash."

She looked at him very coldly. In that moment he had suddenly thought of another woman, a young bride, who, with tears of consternation and sympathy in her eyes, had brought out an account-book and pencil and said: "I'll get the gas out of the thirty shillings, too."

That was the kind of reception a man expected for his troubles. But after Roselle had let him pay for their expensive lunch, she had needed other things—perfume and candy. And she "borrowed" the rent of her rooms from him for several weeks.

She went back to London two months ahead of him, having written for and secured a moderately good engagement.

During the two months he missed her a little in the Runaway, where her presence had secured for him an extra mark of distinction; but he had rather the feeling of a man surfeited. He put it to himself in modern slang: "I was fed up," he said. "She only wanted me to get the tickets and look after her luggage, and turn up when I was wanted, and be a kind of unpaid courier, while she travelled about getting experiences and hunting for bigger fools than me. I'm about fed up."

Osborn was to stop in Paris for a week on his way back; it was a week to which he had looked forward throughout the year. Paris and expenses practically unlimited! How gay it sounded! What visions it conjured up! But the week was a failure as far as pleasure went, though business was brisk. For Osborn over all the pleasures of Paris there was a frost. It was restless and light and bright, and all this living in hotels and cafes wasn't worth while. He wanted at last, very badly, to be at home again.

He half thought of wiring to Marie to join him. How surprised and delighted and excited she'd be! But how would she arrange about the kids? She couldn't come, of course.

Besides, there was an inimitable pleasure in picturing oneself entering the flat and finding her there just the same as ever.

Osborn did not know Paris with any intimacy. A week-end had been his limit hitherto. So he went to the Bon Marché to look for a gift for Marie, not knowing where else to look, and he bought her any trifle that he could imagine—Roselle's teaching was useful here,—little chiffon collars, and a glittering hair-band ornament that he thought looked very French, and handkerchiefs, and a pair of silk stockings, and garters with great big fluffy pompoms on them. She had had to be rather a mouse during her married life, after the trousseau was worn out and since her children came, anyway. How pleased she would be to have these pretty things!

The evening he arrived, after dinner, they would sit down by the fire and he would tell her all his business news—how well he'd done; all about his hopes and prospects, and he would give her some of his firm's letters to him to read. He would be sure of her sympathy and appreciation.

He had made more than a thousand pounds in commissions that year, and it was waiting for him, in a lump. He drew a long breath at the thought of it.

A thousand pounds! And there would be more to follow, for poor Woodall had died, and he was holding down the job.

He crossed to Dover on a still, cold day; it was an excellent crossing for the time of year. He stood on deck, smoking, watching the white cliffs approach, looking back over the last year and forward to those that lay before him. The last year—how mad and jolly it had been for the greater part! It had been a great piece of folly and a great piece of fun, travelling about with a lovely woman like Roselle Dates; it was a situation which half the men he knew would have envied him. Coming as it did after a humdrum period of domesticity, where a man could not afford either folly or fun, the danger signals had been flying all the time.

He could recall fifty occasions on which he could, or would, gladly have lost his head; but now, retrospecting, he was inclined to give himself the credit rather than Roselle, that their relations had been so innocuous. And at the moment, although every second the boat brought him nearer to her, he felt strangely indifferent as to whether they met again or not. He supposed that he might, perhaps, go to see her in this new play, and perhaps take her out to supper.

He ran up the grey stone stairs like a boy and attained that dear old door, the portal of home. Having mislaid his latchkey, he had listened eagerly, anticipating the sound of Marie's feet flying down the hall. Feet came with a sort of drilled haste, but no eagerness.

He stepped past her, staring somewhat, and the hall porter followed into the hall with the luggage. The sitting-room door opened and Marie came out.

As she came towards her husband she motioned the hall porter to put the bags in the dressing-room. There was about her an assurance and authority, very quiet, but undeniable.

The maid took from him the overcoat which he was shedding, and his wife retreated into the sitting-room, he following.

When the door was shut, she turned, lifted her face, and murmured: "How are you, Osborn?"

He kissed her and, loth to relinquish her, kept his arm about her waist; she was unresponsive, but he did not notice that; they went together to the chesterfield drawn up before the fire and sat down. She took a corner, turning herself to face him a little, so that he had to withdraw his arm from her, and she pushed a billowing cushion which he did not remember into a comfortable position for her back.

She spoke very kindly and sympathetically, but it was with the kindness and sympathy which someone who was a stranger might show. "How well you look! I'm longing to hear all about your doings; your letters did not say very much. I should have met you at Victoria, only there's always a crush, and it's easy to miss people, so I thought I'd stay here."

One of those silences which fall between people who have been estranged fell between them, during which he looked from her to the room, and all about him, and back to her, while she regarded him with that disinterested kindness.

"How nice everything looks!" he said, breaking the silence in a voice which sounded crude to himself. "What a lot of flowers you have, and all these cushions! I don't remember things, as a woman would do, but surely there's something new."

"Only the cushions. I stuffed a lot with one of mother's feather beds. She left me everything, you know."

"So you do," he exclaimed suddenly. "I wish I'd brought you some; there are such lovely ones at Victoria."

He took her hand and drew nearer. "Marie, darling, it's awf'ly good to see you again. This last week in Paris seemed such waste of time, with you so near."

She looked at him with her eyes widening, a trick he found vivid in his memory. A little more colour rose into her cheeks.

"Things have been happening!" he exclaimed, getting up. He pulled caressingly at the hand he held. "You're coming, too?"

"Go in and see them by yourself. See if they remember you. Dispense with my introductions."

She laughed, pulling her hand from his, and he moved away. At the door he looked back, puzzled. An element which he was unprepared for, could not understand, seemed with them in the room. She leaned back among the fat cushions, pretty and leisured as he had been used to seeing her before their marriage, only now she had something else about her which he could not define. She was not looking at him, but down at her hands lying in her lap, and the curling sweep of her eyelashes, the bend of her head, the white nape of her neck, the colour and contour of her cheek—all these he found newly adorable. He almost came back, with a rush of tenderness, longing for a real embrace, but something, that element which he only sensed, restrained him.

He went into the dining-room, where a four-year-old girl nursed a doll and played with a robust baby by turns. They were merry, healthy children, and their chubby prettiness swelled his heart with pride. These were his; he had fathered them. And just through that partitioning wall was a woman who was all his, too; one of the prettiest of women, and his wife.